Having looked at the results of the PISA studies, which tested 15-year-olds, I wanted to know how these skills hold up after people leave school and become adults. So I've been fiddling around with the figures from the OECD's 2000 Adult Literacy Survey report, and thought I'd generously share some conclusions.
The survey, which was carried out in the 1990's, measures skills in three domains:
> . Prose literacy -- the knowledge and skills needed to understand
> and use information from texts including editorials, news stories,
> brochures and instruction manuals.
> . Document literacy -- the knowledge and skills required to locate
> and use information contained in various formats, including job
> applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables
> and charts.
> . Quantitative literacy -- the knowledge and skills required to apply
> arithmetic operations, either alone or sequentially, to numbers
> embedded in printed materials, such as balancing a chequebook,
> figuring out a tip, completing an order form or determining the
> amount of interest on a loan from an advertisement.
The overall US scores on average aren't terrible. Generally the Scandinavian and Teutonic countries are at the top, with the post-Communist and peripheral countries at the bottom. The US, along with the other English-speaking countries, tends to cluster in the middle.
What's more disturbing is what happens when you break the numbers down by age. In every country, there's a significant increase in literacy levels as you move from older to younger cohorts. The pattern is highly regular - across all countries, the correlation between scores of 26-35 year-olds and 56-65-year-olds is (remarkably) 91% on the quantitative and 89% on both the prose and the document tests.
But the U.S. stands out for its younger cohorts experiencing by far the smallest gains. In fact, while US scores for the older group are ranked among the top countries, by the time you get to the younger group they're clearly below the average. (These cohorts essentially represent people born in the 1930's versus those born in the 1960's, all of whom were tested in the 1990's.)
I've calculated the number of points by which each country's younger cohort exceeds or falls short of the score predicted by the score of its older cohort. The US is dead last, by a significant margin, on all three:
PROSE
DOCUMENT
QUANTITATIVE
Finland 22.7
Canada 24.1
Belgium (F) 19.0 Canada 14.0
Finland 23.3
Canada 16.3 Belgium (F) 11.5
Slovenia 14.6
Slovenia 15.8 Sweden 9.8
Norway 10.0
Finland 11.2 Slovenia 9.5
Belgium (F) 8.7
Sweden 6.3 Netherlands 5.8
Sweden 6.1
Norway 3.6 Norway 5.6
Denmark 5.6
Australia 2.6 Australia 5.4
Poland 3.5
Netherlands 1.1 Poland 3.8
Netherlands 2.5
Poland 1.1 UK 0.6
Australia 1.9
Czech Rep 0.9 Ireland -3.3
UK 0.6
Denmark 0.3 Denmark -3.4
Czech Rep -4.8
UK -0.9 Czech Rep -4.3
Hungary -6.0
Hungary -4.0 Portugal -5.1
Ireland -7.6
Ireland -4.8 Germany -5.7
Germany -9.5
Germany -4.9 Switzerland -7.4
Portugal -10.5
Portugal -8.9 Hungary -8.4
Switzerland -11.4
Switzerland -9.4 Chile -14.4
New Zealand -12.3
New Zealand -12.7 New Zealand -15.8
Chile -16.8
Chile -13.3 *United States* *-21.1* * * *United States* *-21.9* * * *United States* *-19.1*
* * To grasp the magnitude of those deviations, note that the difference between young-cohort scores at the 25th percentile and those at the average was 33 to 35 points on the three tests.
SA